tech-ed collisions

An Identity crisis - of sorts

So now that I am blogging as an individual rather than part of my work I have had to rethink my identity on the Web.  Blogging has been part of my professional identity for almost four years.  As I move into a different role with a new look organisation, the likelihood that I will be blogging 'professionally' as 'me' is pretty remote.  However, as an individual I still have things I'd like to say about the use of technology in educational settings. 

What has become obvious is that I need to separate my 'professional self' from my 'personal self' - something that as I dig into it is becoming pretty difficult.  Many of the people that do know me or connect with me in some way on the Web know me through my role in the company where I have worked for some years.  Additionally, as an early adopter of many social networking services, most of the people in those networks that I have connected with have been professional or work relationships rather than personal ones.  Many of my personal friends and family joined these networks much later.

Very early on I was interested in trialling different social networks and obviously the best way you can do that is by connecting with others - most of whom at the time were early adopters and largely known to me through work. Once my personal friends came along I needed to decide whether to have a personal identity and a professional identity or just combine them into one.  Since our personal and professional lives are so intermingled it made sense just to have the one identity. 

That was then.  Now however I am faced with quite a different set of circumstances.  Disentangling the mess that is my Web identity is turning out to be very difficult.  Moving my work blog to a new environment, not associated with work sounds easy enough.  An RSS export migrated all the posts but was not able to migrate the comments and categories.  Additionally, my old blog used to have good 'Google juice' but now all that's gone and I am starting from scratch.  Anyone who subscribed to the old blog probably won't know that I have moved.

Now since I really am separating the personal from the professional me, a really tricky challenge is of course Twitter.  My Twitter friends include professional and personal relationships, professional ones that have become personal and others that I just don't even know how to categorise.  Should I create a personal Twitter identity and a professional one? How do I split my friends up?  Having the freedom to blog independently has also given me the desire to tweet more independently than I have before.  Luckily for me Twitter seems to have solved my dilemna by continually failling when I try to change my username.

My work demands (quite rightly) a level of professionalsim and personal values that is not always shared by people I know outside work.  Some of my friends work in completely different areas, have quite different social and cultural backgrounds and think quite differently to my colleagues at work.  This is a good thing - imagine a world without diversity.  How boring that would be.  However, that can make me a source of well, amusement at best to some of my friends who share the same social networks as my work colleagues - they see me as a hopeless geek if I talk technology as that's not important to them at all and they never talk work in their social networking rants.  Equally, if I respond in the same vein as my personal friends, I may be appearing on some professional friends 'feeds' blurting out something out of context for them.

So, this change in roles at work has forced upon me a rethink of my digital identity.  It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

Filed under  //   identity  
Posted July 20, 2010

on Facebook and Identity

Very interesting post appeared on the ABC news site titled 'Lawyer uses Facebook to serve documents'. A Canberra court has approved using Facebook as a way to serve documents. Apparently, the co-defendants have been hard to reach but there are Facebook accounts which list them as friends and has their birth dates. This would seem to be enough for the judge to qualify Facebook as a legitimate way of serving them. It would be great to see the full transcript that outlines this decision because quite a bit more information would really be needed to properly identify a person. Somehow I don't think I can walk into a bank and have an account created simply by pointing to a website with a claimed birth date and list of friends - that's why they have the 100 point checklist. Claiming identity and authenticating identity are worlds apart. Think of your favourite celebrity. How many sites are there of them that contain far more personally identifying information on them than a birth date and list of friends yet are not maintained at all by the celebrity. What about sites that masquerade as people. It's not difficult to setup an account on social networking sites masquerading as someone else (see this post discussing a number of fake John Howard Facebook accounts). Some services, such as ClaimId, offer an attempt for you to (re)establish your digital identity. Web personalities such as Leo Laporte use this to try to help them. So that's one problem. But just like defendants may not often be at home, what guarantee is there that they will access their Facebook accounts or receive notification that there has been an attempt to contact them via it? Will logs be requested of social networking service providers, ISPs etc in an effort to prove such accounts have been accessed by the 'claimed identities' of the account holders? How many social networking accounts have you opened that you no longer access or particularly care about? How many have you forgotten about? It would seem to me there are a whole lot of potential challenges to this judgment but it certainly highlights the importance of your digital identity(s)!

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Filed under  //   Facebook   identity  

identity management for education/HR sectors

The Liberty Alliance group as just announced a new "Public Group Targeting Interoperability Across Education and Human Resources Applications and Services". From the eifel news service:

Liberty Alliance, the global identity community working to build a more trustworthy Internet for businesses, governments and people worldwide, today announced the launch of the public Liberty Alliance Human Resources and Education Special Interest Group (SIG). The goal of the group is to foster interoperability, security and user privacy across online identity-enabled solutions in the global education and human resources sectors. The Human Resources and Education (HR-EDU) SIG will hold its first public face-to-face meeting on October 22 at the ePortfolio & Digital Identity 2008 conference in Maastricht, the Netherlands
More information is available at the project wiki. Looks like an interesting one to follow, given our current interest in identity and trust federations in the education sectors here.

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Filed under  //   identity  

the Panopticon gets that little bit closer

Telstra's Whereis Everyone service is bound to raise a few eyebrows. It's great if you want to locate a few friends and they are happy for you to be able to locate where they are at anytime but..... what about any privacy concerns? Are you happy to be located anywhere anytime? The press and commentators, as usual, is going to town on some of the more alarmist uses. We have very little privacy left in our lives - some would argue that it disappeared some time ago. Anyway, here's another example of technology with the potential for intruding further into our lives. Telstra has some great sales pitches - its certainly nice to be able to know your kids are on their way home or how you can find your misplaced phone (is it really that accurate?) but are we becoming immune or blase to these invasions of privacy? If we know we are being monitored so closely will that affect our behaviour in any way (as in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon) or are we simply past caring?

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Wikipedia also has an interesting modern definition of the Panopticon. I had a rant about this previously after reading "John Twelve Hawk's" "The Traveller" (must have a look to see if the sequel is out yet). Anyway, if you are interested in this type of technology from legal/policy/social perspectives, you might like to go along to UNSW's free one day seminar 'You are where you've been - technological threats to your location privacy' on 23rd July. Just don't forget to turn your (Telstra) phone off before you go ;).

Filed under  //   identity   privacy  
Posted July 8, 2008